Turns out The Low Anthem has a rock streak after all; unless they opened electrically, they just took their time getting around to it. But ragged hollowbody guitar and tipsy drums gave "Hey, All You Hippies!" an appropriate Buffalo Springfield cast; the harmonica of "Boeing 737" added another layer of Neil Young; and the garage/Dylan mash-up of Jack Kerouac's "Home I'll Never Be" outstomped even Double Kick Fetus down there.

Most impressively, the band kept those close harmonies among all the din, and continued to do so throughout the set while backing off on the volume and switching out instruments on nearly every song - trumpet, pump organ, bowed bass, banjo and bells, and the smallest euphonium Aftermath had ever seen on melancholy snail's-pace chorale "This Goddamn House," which, paradoxically, radiated both loneliness and warmth.

At the end of that one, Mr. Double Kick Fetus took out two cell phones and held them close enough together that the song faded out in a haze of high-pitched feedback to a pitch-dark room. A cryptic commentary on the lack of true communication in modern times, perhaps, but a cool effect regardless.

That and one of the band's traveling companions - besides the four we walked in on, two or three other people came on and offstage during the evening, including opener Daniel Lefkowicz, who spent the rest of the time keeping an eye on his spoon collection at the merch table - surreptitiously checking his smartphone was the only hint that the Low Anthem even belonged in the 21st century, or even the 20th.

When Aftermath's buddy asked us where the band was from, we seriously considered saying "1862." It was as if a troupe of scruffy Civil War minstrels wandered through a rip in time into Okkervil River's backyard.